My second publication of the year, a crime story called "Short Con" is out now in the March issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine!
Read a sample of my story and then check out the full issue, containing it and many others!
|
This week, you can get your copy of Above Water, a Rural Crime Story for free on Kindle!  Morgan needed a little help, just something to keep his head above water, but tight-fisted old Uncle Mike wouldn't hear of it. If Morgan didn't get that money, they'd kill him, so else could he do but take matters into his own hands?
The eBook also includes an excerpt from BURN ME OUT, my newest novel, so this is an excellent chance to check that out as well, if you were interested and haven't taken the plunge yet. Go get yours right now!  Just a quick update this week, but some big news. First, I'm pleased to say I sold my heist story "Twitch" to Tough!  You may recall that Tough published my story Above Water in the summer of 2019. I'm very happy to be returning to its pages. Second, I'm also pleased to say I've sold my haibun (a Japanese hybrid form combining prose and haiku), entitled "One Man's Delicacy" to Hiraeth Books to appear in their upcoming sci-fi anthology.  More news on both as it's available to me! Stay tuned!
I've got a copy of NERVOSA in my hands right now!  And you can get your own copy, either in print or on Kindle - free on Kindle unlimited! Check out this sweet wraparound cover on the print edition!
So check it out!
The #1-rated horror novel on Textnovel.com is available to own at last! The Parkers are down-on-their-luck, desperately in need of a fresh start and a lucky break. When Rose is sucked into a cycle of recurring dreams filled with monstrously burned and disfigured people, her world unravels and her dreams start to become a nightmarish reality. Though Robert Bloch will always be known first and foremost as the author of Psycho (and with good reason), I recently read his first novel, The Scarf, and loved it. Like Psycho, it's a psychological crime novel, but this one is rather different.  Originally published in 1947, twelve years before Psycho, The Scarf seems to have been quietly published and quietly slipped under the radar for many years. Bloch continued to write and publish, but it wasn't until Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho to film that many of Bloch's older works received renewed interest. (You'll note that the copy of the book I own is published by Gold Medal; the 60 cent price puts it squarely in the mid-60s, '66 in this case.) Some of those works were solid, but forgettable, but The Scarf at least deserves that attention.
The novel is about Daniel Morley, a man with a self-proclaimed fetish for the scarf he always wears - a scarf which he received from his high school English teacher who--so Morley says--tried to rape him and he killed in self-defense. This earned Morley a degree of fame early in his life, but not the kind anyone really wants, and he spends the next decade wandering as something of a ne'er-do-well, committing minor crimes, grifting, but always carrying with him the scarf - with which he has killed multiple times, essentially whenever he feels a woman is becoming too close to him emotionally. Morley's dream, however, is to become a writer and he resolves to give up his past and start fresh, hopefully as a rich and famous novelist. And it seemingly works out well - for a while, anyway, until that old "fetish" rears its ugly head again. The Scarf, told in a first-person narrative with an inherently unreliable narrator, is basically the story of a man trying to save himself from himself and we're kept in suspense as Morley tries, taking increasingly extraordinary steps, to do so. Where Bloch's mastery of psychological fiction shows through, though, is that he doesn't try to make Morley sympathetic, as many authors would try to do. Morley is a deranged, vile scumbag. We're wondering if he'll succeed while hoping he doesn't and as Bloch, and Morley himself via his journal he calls "The Black Notebook", gives us more insight into his background, we wonder if all is as it seems. Of course, since it's Bloch, it's not. And one of my favorite things about this novel is that, unlike Psycho, the ending is completely natural to the story and the character. Don't get me wrong, I like Psycho a lot, but the ending, with its forced exposition to make sense of the scenario, felt just that - forced. When we are shown the "secret" behind Morley's history, everything in The Scarf neatly makes sense. Do yourself a favor and track this one down. It's worth it. Other Bloch recommendations include: Spider's Web, a fantastic true noir (the only true noir Bloch wrote as far as I know), and Shooting Star, Bloch's only private eye novel. It's been more than three years since TextNovel.com went dark, but I hope at least some of you folks out there remember my first cellphone novel, NERVOSA. What started as a way to keep my hand in when I was having doubts about my place in the writing world ended up becoming the top-rated work in the horror category of the site and the fourth-rated work overall among something like 67,000 total works on the website. TextNovel is long gone, but you can read NERVOSA and even own a copy, thanks to Full Speed Publishing. The #1-rated horror novel on Textnovel.com is available to own at last! The Parkers are down-on-their-luck, desperately in need of a fresh start and a lucky break. When Rose is sucked into a cycle of recurring dreams filled with monstrously burned and disfigured people, her world unravels and her dreams start to become a nightmarish reality.  Cover art by Marcus Muller For those not aware, there is a style of writing originating in Japan, but popular across Asia, called keitai shousetsu – literally “mobile-phone novel”. Popular primarily among young people, these are novels written in tiny chapters of seventy to a hundred words, written on cellphones, posted on websites (either personal websites or, more likely since the early aughts sites devoted to them), and intended to be read on cellphones. Basically, each chapter is just enough text to display on a cellphone screen without scrolling. A number of works that began as cellphone novels have been adapted to other media, including manga, anime and even live-action. The most famous of these is probably King’s Game, a survival-horror series about a virus that forces people to play the titular game in order to spread itself. I discovered the phenomenon around 2015. I thought for some time it’d be interesting to try my hand at it. Nervosa is my first attempt. It’s a horror novel that I updated twice a week for nearly two years. At that time, Textnovel.com was no longer as active as it once was. There were still both writers and readers, but many works that began years earlier had been left abandoned, unfinished, by their authors. Posting a brand-new story and updating it regularly gained me an unexpectedly large following on the site. It seems that even those authors still writing their works were only updating sporadically and without intending to, I became the primary provider of content on the site for a while. During that time, Nervosa jumped up the rankings charts quickly, eventually becoming the number-one-rated work in the horror genre, beating out the former number one by nearly ten-thousand votes and views. Considering the previous work had been on the site for something like six years, I was thrilled and honored to have so many people read and support my work. The print edition is already available and the Kindle edition will be available on 2/2!
Click the link above or the cover image or right here to order your copy! This week I'm revisiting one of my all-time favorite manhwa, the fantasy/comedy web-comic ARON'S ABSURD ARMADA by MiSun Kim.  I love this comic. A lot.
There's millions of web-comics (probably literally), and I have read hundreds, many from start to finish as they were produced/published, many of which I still read and will continue to read as long as they are on-going. But here's the thing: like anything else long-running, very few web-comics, even the good ones, are consistently good. And by very few, I mean almost none. It's not the fault of the creators' necessarily - it's a difficult format and humor, which many web-comics fall under the umbrella of, is an especially difficult genre to pull off and keep pulling off consistently. ARON'S ABSURD ARMADA does that. Does it brilliantly, in fact. The set-up is fairly simple: Lord Aron Cornwall, the son of a duke, who is third in line for the throne of a kingdom that initially seems to be England (though the location/origin of which later becomes nebulous as the series strays from the original historical setting to a more fantasy-oriented one) is good-natured, adventurous and exceptionally stupid. And bored. Very very very very bored. His dream? To become a pirate. And when he expresses this to his doting mother (doting only to him; she's rather nasty to everyone else, including Aron's father), she buys him a ship, hires him a crew and sends him off. And away we go! What follows are increasingly zany, ridiculous and hilarious adventures as Aron and company search for treasure, fight the royal navy (often Aron's childhood--and prior to the start of the series, only--friend, Lord Luther Nelson, who frequently contrives ways to let Aron off the hook), monsters, demons, gods, kings and sometimes each other while going through who knows how many ships and constantly adding new and unusual members to the crew. Aron, the dullest knife in any drawer you can think of, nevertheless has a talent for attracting people - only they're frequently the worst kind of incompetents, such as: a chef whose food kills people no matter how hard he works at improving his cooking; a transvestite assassin slash hair-dresser with literal hair-growth magic who is mostly concerned with being the most beautiful person in any group he finds himself part of; a phantom thief who is the most skilled thief on the planet, but who doesn't really like stealing from people cuz it isn't very nice; a witch who can create potions that can do literally anything you want them to - but will kill you the next day without fail. It gets increasingly complex and silly as numerous characters are added, their stories woven into the main narrative (each arc of which usually take place over 20-30 strips at a time) and sometimes taking over entirely, as it transitions from a more or less historically-accurate late 17th/early 18th-century European setting to a more fantasy and/or sci-fi setting. No matter what the story brings, though, it's never less than hilariously zany and lightly whimsical. The art is also fantastic, seamlessly switching from somewhat sketchy, but good-quality realistic manga-esque style to more SD cartoony styles when appropriate, and the interspersed standard comic stories (page to page sequentials instead of strips) give MiSun Kim a chance to show her artistic chops off. There's really very little I can say about this comic that isn't complimentary. I just loved it and I know you will, too, if you give it a chance. Some news I wanted to save for the new year: several months ago, I sold a novel entitled STRANGERS' KINGDOM to Black Rose Writing, publishers of my novel BURN ME OUT. Here's the back-cover blurb: Politically blacklisted detective Luke Campbell’s last chance in law-enforcement is a job with the police department of rural Granton, Vermont. It’s a beautiful town, home to a beautiful, intriguing girl who’s caught his eye, and it’s a chance at redemption. Even if his new boss seems strange, secretive, and vaguely sinister, Campbell is willing to give this opportunity a shot. And no sooner does he make that decision than the first in a series of murders is discovered, starting a chain of events that will change the lives of everyone in this once-quiet town… I've turned in my final manuscript to the publisher and solicited some blurbs from other authors and am waiting to hear back from the publisher regarding any further changes they may want to make, as well as things like cover design. Currently, STRANGERS' KINGDOM is scheduled for release the third week of August. Check back often for more news and further details!  2020 is finally dead and gone. Thank God. Let's all cross our fingers for a better 2021.  |
Brandon BarrowsI'm Brandon and I write comic books, prose and poetry. I own dozens of clever and interesting t-shirts.  Archives
March 2021
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed